There is much to be said for the programmer that can zone themselves out from all the noise in the office. I used to work with such a programmer. She would sit and code with her headphones on (not uncommon for most programmers), but what made Taryn unique was that she was very good at programming. She had her ‘thing’ down to a T, and would pump out excellent code in copious amounts of C# or Visual Basic on a daily basis.

Skype Eavesdropping, yes that is correct; Skype is giving the NSA access to customer communications. That means everything you do on Skype, consider it logged on a server somewhere. How would you stay ahead of the game? Where do you begin protecting your assets and on-line communications? Dylan Love chats about NSA-securing your digital world.

It seams that Edward Snowden is heading for Ecuador, which would make sense because the man needs a place where he can live free from persecution. At least he has an ally in WikiLeaks. This makes for some great reading, so check out TC Sottek’s article.

Here is to the start of a new week. Hope that you folks have a great Monday. Here is The Daily Six Pack.

VS Anywhere is a third-party tool for Visual Studio. It helps to increase the collaboration between team members and especially developers. VS Anywhere will also allow knowledge transfer where Developers can setup and join a real-time learning session on-demand.

Do you think that great programmers are born, not made? What do you think about that statement? Take a look at the post below by Dave. I’d love to hear some of your opinions in the comments section below. If you enjoy this post, you might also like one of my previous posts: IT Professionals, An Evolutionary Tale.

Lastly, Abhijit Jana shares a real gem of a Visual Studio tip to import and export breakpoints. Some of you might know it already, but I still feel that it is really worth a mention.

There we go, it’s Friday. Have an excellent day today! Here is The Daily Six Pack!

Programming Skills are essential to every programmer out there. But there is something that no school or institution can teach you. To become better at what you do with regards to programming, you first need to learn how to become a better person. The reason for this is that you need to interact with people first and foremost before you write a single line of code. If you suck at interacting with people, how can you do something as simple as gathering requirements for a system you are about to develop?

Fran Hoey touches on some non-coding skills that will surely make you a better programmer. Then you can also have a look at my previous blog post: IT Professionals, An Evolutionary Tale. Check it out for a cool infographic on the evolution of the IT Pro.

You can also have a look at the post by Arron on the web on becoming an Elite Developer. Lots of these posts are intertwined and we as professionals should take note of them. Then, we have a sneak peek at Internet Explorer 11 being released with Windows 8.1 (hands up all who are giddy with excitement over that one) and lastly Jeff Blankenburg shares an awesome post on what is on his desk. It says a lot about a person and seeing what other developers have going on in their work space is another opportunity for the rest of us to learn.

Well that is all that I have for today, I hope that you all have a fantastic Tuesday! Here is The Daily Six Pack!

Code Comments are essential to every programmer’s job. It is especially important if you’re the programmer that needs to understand what the code needs to do. The problem is that code comments are many times a tedious affair and not many programmers keep it up throughout the project. That is why I am a big believer (and active user of) Atomineer, probably one of the best code comments tools I have ever used. See the review: Atomineer Pro Documentation for Visual Studio 2012.

Then, Visual Studio solutions can contain a large number of projects. By default Visual Studio loads all the projects in a solution when the solution is opened. It also does not allow you to access any projects until all of them have finished loading. Enter the solution load manager.

Lastly, what would The Daily Six Pack be without a link regarding Xbox One. Love it or hate it, the choice is a personal one (Mind the pun). For me, the jury is still out on that one (okay, this is getting old).

It is Friday!! The weekend is almost upon us, so have a great day today! Take it easy and enjoy The Daily Six Pack!

Hello and welcome to more tech goodness. Beth Massi, a Senior Program Manager on Microsoft’s Visual Studio team answers a couple questions she received recently. In particular, how do you add data to tables with a one-to-zero-or-one relationship in Visual Studio LightSwitch.

Then you might remember that earlier in the week Julie Larson-Green was at the WIRED Business Conference discussing Windows and it’s evolution. Microsoft updates more than a billion unique Windows PCs each month with updates. Most of these run Windows 7, and some even still run Windows XP. (Serious Tech stats right there)

What is clear though that more and more people are running Windows 8 each day. In fact, Tami Reller announced that Microsoft sold more than 100 million licenses of Windows 8. This in just the first six months on the market. Read more at the link below.

Business analyst, technologist, Microsoft MVP, SkyWarn storm spotter, wannabe fitness freak, and nerd from Moore, Oklahoma, Shawn Keene gives us the inside info on the hardware and software he uses the most. I enjoy such posts. What an IT person uses tells the rest of us quite a lot about that person. It also makes you realize what you should be doing in many instances.

That’s it for today folks! Have a great Saturday and see you on Monday! Here is The Daily Six Pack.

When I started programming as a career, I did so in VB.NET. It was my preferred language of choice and I never thought of trying C#. When I changed jobs back in 2007, I forced myself to take a leap of faith and use C# exclusively.

Okay, so I don’t have a specific series for this and seeing as this is more of a programming tip, I’ll leave it out of the Visual Studio 2012 Tips series. Caller Information Attributes are a very useful and probably underutilized feature implemented in the C#5.0 Compiler. Caller Information Attributes allow you to see how your method was called. So forget having to sift through the stack trace in order to achieve diagnostic level logging, use Caller Information Attributes instead.

You know that feeling when you are in the groove, and the code just flows? You might be listening to music (Pink Floyd or Ahmad Jamal is my code music) or sitting in complete silence. You might code to Slayer blasting in your ears or flourish in the hum drum of the office din. Whatever your thing is, we can all agree that there is no better place than that place…. your comfort coding zone.

I really enjoy these GIF’s that illustrate a different meaning than the original scene they were taken from. I decided to create a few myself, just for the fun of it. If you know of some really funny ones, let us know in the comments. Also check out part 2: Typical Developers Life… in GIF’s (How you feel when…) – Part 2